Kiev police briefly detain LifeNews correspondent

November 05, 2014, 0:12 UTC+3MOSCOWAt the police station, Zmanovskaya wrote an explanatory statement where she said that she was in Kiev on an assignment from the editorial office to cover the so-called Slavic March in the city center

“LifeNews correspondent Yevgeniya Zmanovskaya was let go from a Kiev police station where she spent the last few hours. Despite the fact that police officers raised the issue of possible deportation of the journalist from the territory of Ukraine in their conversations, the law enforcers finally let the young woman go,” the report said.

At the police station, Zmanovskaya wrote an explanatory statement where she said that she was in Kiev on an assignment from the editorial office to cover the so-called Slavic March in the city center.

“Policemen behaved in a reasonable way and did not insult the journalist, unlike representatives of the Ukrainian media [who did],” the statement said.

A LifeNews spokesman said Ukrainian journalists surrounded the LifeNews camera crew and asked a police officer to check their IDs. Zmanovskaya did not have a passport, only a reporter’s ID, so she was detained on those grounds. The cameraman, LifeNews said, was allowed to bring Zmanovskaya’s passport to the police station.

Earlier, Russian journalists working for the LifeNews TV channel, Oleg Sidyakin and Marat Saychenko, were detained by the Ukrainian authorities.

Sidyakin and Saychenko were detained by Ukrainian law enforcers near the city of Kramatorsk in the Donetsk Region in eastern Ukraine on May 18. Victoria Siumar, a deputy head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, accused the LifeNews journalists of being “members of terrorist groups”.

They were released a week later after reportedly being held under severe conditions.

According to UN data, over 4,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands have fled Ukraine’s southeast as a result of clashes between Ukrainian troops and local militias in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions during Kiev’s military operation, conducted since mid-April, to regain control over the breakaway territories, which call themselves the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s republics.

The parties to the Ukrainian conflict agreed on a ceasefire at talks mediated by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on September 5 in Belarusian capital Minsk two days after Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed his plan to settle the situation in the east of Ukraine.